Of Almonds and emotions

Hello there! Vanya here. It was 9th June, I had my last entrance exam that day and guess what? I ended up going to a bookstore after that. So while browsing through the sections I found a book which had an interesting cover and obviously, I bought it. And this book made me learn about a bit about relationship between evolution and emotions.

Do you know why emotions exists in brain of almost all organism? To survive. Imagine, if you felt nothing when you were crossing a road. Then you wouldn’t feel the fear of being injured. Hence the chances of you being injured would be higher ( if that makes sense). Even Darwin talks about this in one of his books saying,

The language of the emotions, as it has sometimes been called, is certainly of importance for the welfare of mankind. 

Or consider an instance. A mother loves it’s child. Why? Because that offspring is the key to survival of the species. It is the future of its kind. Now if we look back it kind of feels very mechanical to me.

Well, I read that book called ‘The Almond’ (translated from Korean) which resulted in full 3 hrs extra reading on fear defence mechanisms. Coming back to it, this is one of the book that made a deep impact on me. It is a story of a young boy named Yunjae who lives in Korea with underdeveloped amygdala, an almond shaped part in brain that processes the emotions. Due to this defect, he can’t express the emotions. This is an actual disease named Alexithymia. He is more or less like a robot. He sees the things, he don’t understand the emotions over there. And thus no survival instincts. It’s not like he don’t have emotions. He just can’t understand it or express it.

So how did he survived all these years? His mother teaches him emotions and how to react to them just like we teach kids Alphabets and numbers. But still it’s all mechanical. It gets complex as emotions get complex as he grows up. He meets his best friend Gon- a person who can’t control his emotions. Then after a tragic incident he meets Dr.Shim, a bakery owner who was a former doctor. The conversations between him and Dr.Shim are best part of the book.

“Does growing mean changing?”
“Probably. For better or for worse,” he replied.”

Gradually as the story progresses, he somewhat starts to have very faint traces of emotions. There were times when I was like, this guy should not feel it. But the story has explanations to it.

He finds books of his mother’s secondhand bookstore fascinating and even if he don’t feel what he is reading, he finds his shelter in books.

“But books are quiet. They remain dead silent until somebody flips open a page. Only then do they spill out their stories, calmly and thoroughly, just enough at a time for me to handle.”

One ironic thing I found is , A story about an emotionless guy made me to feel ranges of emotions.

“Lastly, and I know it sounds like an excuse, but neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to know!